Quotulatiousness

August 8, 2020

Andrew Sullivan – “[T]he Kendi test: does the staff reflect the demographics of New York City as a whole?”

Filed under: Business, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In his latest Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan looks at an earnest diversity initiative of The Newspaper Guild of New York:

I’m naming this after Ibram X. Kendi because his core contribution to the current debate on race is the notion that “any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups” is racist. Intent is irrelevant. I don’t think many sane people believe A.G. Sulzberger or Dean Baquet are closet bigots. But systemic racism, according to Kendi, exists in any institution if there is simply any outcome that isn’t directly reflective of the relevant racial demographics of the surrounding area.

The appeal of this argument is its simplicity. You can tell if a place is enabling systemic racism merely by counting the people of color in it; and you can tell if a place isn’t by the same rubric. The drawback, of course, is that the world isn’t nearly as simple. Take the actual demographics of New York City. On some measures, the NYT is already a mirror of NYC. Its staff is basically 50 – 50 on sex (with women a slight majority of all staff on the business side, and slight minority in editorial). And it’s 15 percent Asian on the business side, 10 percent in editorial, compared with 13.9 percent of NYC’s population.

But its black percentage of staff — 10 percent in business, 9 percent in editorial — needs more than doubling to reflect demographics. Its Hispanic/Latino staff amount to only 8 percent in business and 5 percent in editorial, compared with 29 percent of New York City’s demographics, the worst discrepancy for any group. NYT’s Newsroom Fellowship, bringing in the very next generation, is 80 percent female, 60 percent people of color (including Asians), and, so far as I can tell, one lone white man. And it’s why NYT‘s new hires are 43 percent people of color, a definition that includes Asian-Americans.

But notice how this new goal obviously doesn’t reflect New York City’s demographics in many other ways. It draws overwhelmingly from the college educated, who account for only 37 percent of New Yorkers, leaving more than 60 percent of the city completed unreflected in the staffing. It cannot include the nearly 19 percent of New Yorkers in poverty, because a NYT salary would end that. It would also have to restrict itself to the literate, and, according to Literacy New York, 25 percent of people in Manhattan “lack basic prose literary skills” along with 37 percent in Brooklyn and 41 percent in the Bronx. And obviously, it cannot reflect the 14 percent of New Yorkers who are of retirement age, or the 21 percent who have yet to reach 18. For that matter, I have no idea what the median age of a NYT employee is — but I bet it isn’t the same as all of New York City.

Around 10 percent of staffers would have to be Republicans (and if the paper of record nationally were to reflect the country as a whole, and not just NYC, around 40 percent would have to be). Some 6 percent of the newsroom would also have to be Haredi or Orthodox Jews — a community you rarely hear about in diversity debates, but one horribly hit by a hate crime surge. 48 percent of NYT employees would have to agree that religion is “very important” in their lives; and 33 percent would be Catholic. And the logic of these demographic quotas is that if a group begins to exceed its quota — say Jews, 13 percent — a Jewish journalist would have to retire for any new one to be hired. Taking this proposal seriously, then, really does require explicit use of race in hiring, which is illegal, which is why the News Guild tweet and memo might end up causing some trouble if the policy is enforced.

And all this leaves the category of “white” completely without nuance. We have no idea whether “white” people are Irish or Italian or Russian or Polish or Canadians in origin. Similarly, we do not know if “black” means African immigrants, or native black New Yorkers, or people from the Caribbean. 37 percent of New Yorkers are foreign-born. How does the Guild propose to mirror that? Ditto where staffers live in NYC. How many are from Staten Island, for example, or the Bronx, two places of extremely different ethnic populations? These categories, in other words, are incredibly crude if the goal really is to reflect the actual demographics of New York City. But it isn’t, of course.

My point is that any attempt to make a specific institution entirely representative of the demographics of its location will founder on the sheer complexity of America’s demographic story and the nature of the institution itself. Journalism, for example, is not a profession sought by most people; it’s self-selecting for curious, trouble-making, querulous assholes who enjoy engaging with others and tracking down the truth (at least it used to be). There’s no reason this skillset or attitude will be spread evenly across populations. It seems, for example, that disproportionate numbers of Jews are drawn to it, from a culture of high literacy, intellectualism, and social activism. So why on earth shouldn’t they be over-represented?

And that’s true of other institutions too: are we to police Broadway to make sure that gays constitute only 4 percent of the employees? Or, say, nursing, to ensure that the sex balance is 50-50? Or a construction company for gender parity? Or a bike messenger company’s staff to be reflective of the age demographics of the city? Just take publishing — an industry not far off what the New York Times does. 74 percent of its employees are women. Should there be a hiring freeze until the men catch up?

July 29, 2020

The Equity, Inclusivity, and Diversity Industrial Complex

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Economics, Education, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Dominion, Ben Woodfinden comments on a Ross Douthat column on the “antiracist” demands of our modern protestariat (the hordes of un- or under-employed university-educated young liberals and socialists):

University College, University of Toronto, 31 July, 2008.
Photo by “SurlyDuff” via Wikimedia Commons.

… the most interesting aspect of this lockdown-induced outpouring of collective rage hasn’t been the protests, or the cancellations, but the woke job creation that is going on. The ideology behind things like “white fragility” is increasingly being transformed into what can be described as an equity-inclusivity-diversity (EID) industrial complex that might end up being the most significant long term structural change that emerges out of the protests.

One of the most common responses in elite institutions as they promise to address systemic racism has been the creation of new jobs and positions that will supposedly help to do so. For instance, the Washington Post created a set of new positions that will be focusing on racial issues. This included hiring a “Managing Editor for Diversity and Inclusion.” At Princeton, the administration announced, like many other elite universities, new courses (which means new teaching opportunities) focused on racial injustice, as well as new projects and funding for research to explore and address racial issues. Stanford has created a new Centre for Racial Justice at its law school.

This direct job creation is just the tip of the iceberg. The real EID industrial complex is in the creation of a vast number of new jobs dedicated to the promotion and advancement of the basic tenets of this ascendant ideology through the expansion of human resource departments to deal with these issues, the creation of new EID bureaucrats and administrators in universities, corporations, government departments, the rise of EID consulting and mandatory courses and workshops for employees, new jobs and potential litigation for lawyers, as well as courses and modules in law schools to teach aspiring lawyers about these things.

In the bestselling Ibram X. Kendi book How To Be An Antiracist, one of Kendi’s central solutions is to pass an anti-racist amendment to the U.S. Constitution and permanently establish and fund a Department of Anti-racism. This department:

    would be comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees. The DOA would be responsible for preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas. The DOA would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.

The radical tendencies of the bourgeois bolsheviks in the streets might make them seem like true revolutionaries, but what this movement seems to actually want to create, with remarkable success, is new employment opportunities for true believers in the new anti-racist creeds. Racism won’t so much be solved by tearing society down, but by massively expanding new professional and managerial jobs that can guarantee full employment for the credentialed class of true believers.

O’Boyle’s thesis is that the revolutions that swept across European cities in 1848 were because a large surplus of resentful and overeducated men felt society was denying to them what they were rightfully owed. O’Boyle looks at Germany, where university education was cheap, and was “emphasized as an avenue to wealth and power.” This ending up producing an excess of ambitious, but resentful and frustrated men who felt society was not allotting them the status and comfort they deserved. The same was true in France. But in Britain, the opportunities produced by industrialization that had yet to fully materialize on the continent kept this excess surplus of overeducated men much smaller, and helped insulate Britain from revolution.

What if the EID industrial complex actually helps to reduce the scarcity of opportunities in elite fields and institutions that will put a lid on the unrest that overproduction breeds? The EID industry is worth billions of dollars, and in a way it might be the solution liberalism offers to both the radical progressivism of this ideology, and to the challenge posed by elite overproduction.

July 27, 2020

H.L. Mencken

Filed under: Books, History, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, Eric Oppen (with whom I’ve had a few brief email conversations) discusses the work of the “Sage of Baltimore”:

H.L. Mencken in 1928.
Photo by Ben Pinchot for Theatre Magazine, August 1928.

I would say that, on the whole, Mencken is still quite readable and enjoyable, and many of his observations on the American scene are still as valid as when he made them. He has his weaknesses. He’s not much of an historian, which limits him when he takes up historical subjects. He never got over what he saw as the unfair treatment the German cause got in the American press between 1914 and the entry of the US into World War One. He also often identifies people as Jewish or black when it’s not really relevant to what he’s saying, but this was more a custom of his time than out-and-out bigotry. While he often has uncomplimentary things to say about Jews, and blacks, his greatest scorn is reserved for “the lintheads” — his term for the poor whites of the South. He regarded them as barely worthy of human status.

[…] his views on most subjects were quite compatible with libertarian positions. He was an inveterate opponent of government overreaching (which was behind a lot of his ferocious opposition to Prohibition) and while I don’t think he’d approve of drug use, he’d see our War on (Some Unpopular) Drugs as the assault on the Constitution that it is. While he was by no means hostile to blacks, and went out of his way to promote black writers (many of the figures in the “Harlem Renaissance” owed a lot to his support), he’d also denounce affirmative action and our current frenzy of “anti-racism” in scathing terms. His views on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and how it has been turned into an alternate, and superior, Constitution would probably scorch the paint off the walls.

Mencken’s views on people’s private lives would have infuriated many of his contemporaries. While he disapproved of homosexuality, referring to it negatively in entries in his private diaries, he was by no means a howling “homophobe.” His writings on the travails of Oscar Wilde are very sympathetic to Wilde’s sufferings, which Mencken thought were wholly disproportionate to what he was known to have done. Mencken referred to Lord Alfred Douglas, in a review of Douglas’ book about Wilde, as a Tartuffe — that is to say, a posturing hypocrite.

Having been a reporter for years in Baltimore, back when reporters were very like the old film noir view of them, Mencken was very much a man of the world, and inclined to great tolerance on others’ sex lives. When he wrote of prostitutes, he refrained from the sort of pious moralizing that was expected in his time. He said that prostitutes often actively preferred their profession to other work available to them, and that most of them ended up respectably married. He kept his own love life very private, and was a faithful husband to his wife throughout their brief marriage, but he does mention, here and there, having had other lovers, whom he does not name even in writings designated to come to light only long after everybody involved was dead. By his own account in his Diary, he lost his virginity at age fourteen to a girl of his own age, who had already had other experiences before him. He felt that such experiences, unless pregnancy happened, did no one any harm.

While he was an atheist, Mencken had no particular hostility to religion per se, no matter what the Fundamentalists of his day thought. His book Treatise on the Gods makes interesting reading, although it is marred, in my view, by Mencken’s lack of knowledge of languages. He praises Christianity for having “the most gorgeous poetry,” but as far as I know, he could not read Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek, and was thinking in terms of the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. However, the book is still worth reading, although a serious student of the subject would find it limited.

If you’ve been a regular visitor to the blog, you’ll know I have a huge regard for H.L. Mencken’s work and there are many Mencken quotes that have done duty as QotD entries over the years.

July 24, 2020

Orchestras encouraged to ditch blind auditions for reasons of diversity

Filed under: Business, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tal Bachman responds to a recent New York Times article by Tony Tommasini demanding that musical organizations ignore the relative quality of a potential musician’s play in order to ensure more visible minority players get hired:

The New York Philharmonic Orchestra, detail from a group portrait in 2018.
Photo from the New York Philharmonic Orchestra website.

Tommasini begins his piece, entitled “To Make Orchestras More Diverse, End Blind Auditions”, by decrying the racism and sexism which, he claims, kept the orchestras of yesteryear predominantly white and male. He then pays tribute to the simple practice that helped erase that racism and sexism from orchestra hiring procedures: the blind audition. Starting in the late 1960s, orchestras began ditching traditional face-to-face auditions in favour of auditions that took place behind screens. With orchestra administrators no longer able to see the race or sex of the orchestra applicant, conscious and unconscious bias in hiring choices became impossible. Musical skill became the sole criterion for winning one of those prized professional playing positions.

This meritocratic turn, Tommasini argues, proved especially beneficial to female players. Whereas in 1970, women made up only 6% of orchestras, they now make up somewhere between a third and half of an average orchestra.

I add that audiences also benefited from meritocratic hiring processes as orchestras played increasingly brilliant renditions of the classics. Those improved performances also showed greater reverence for the original composers themselves. In short, the blind audition was a big win for all lovers of musical excellence – players, living composers, and fans alike.

So why on earth would anyone now call for their abolition?

Tommasini answers this way:

    Blind auditions changed the face of American orchestras. But not enough. American orchestras remain among the nation’s least racially diverse institutions, especially in regard to black and Latino artists … Ensembles must be able to take proactive steps to address the appalling racial imbalance that remains in their ranks. Blind auditions are no longer tenable.

In other words, the low number of black and Latino classical musicians means orchestras need to re-institute the old-time racial discrimination Tommasini began his article by decrying. Orchestras need to know which applicants are white and Asian precisely so they can refuse to hire them on that basis, no matter how skilled they are. Blind auditions make racial discrimination impossible, so they must be scrapped. American orchestras, writes Tommasini, should stop “passively waiting for representation to emerge from behind the audition screen”. Instead, they must realize that “removing the screen is a crucial step”.

To summarize: For Tommasini, it’s not just that justice requires injustice. It’s that justice is injustice (injustice in the form of racial discrimination). And if that reminds you of the official slogan of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth in 1984 – war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength – you’re not alone.

July 22, 2020

How the left lost its sense of humour

Filed under: History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Matt Taibbi outlines the way “the right” used to be the humourless scolds and omnipresent busybodies demanding the government trample the rights of people they didn’t like, then points out that the progressives have become exactly the people they used to poke fun at:

The old Republican right’s idea of “humor” was its usual diatribes against Bad People, only with puns thrown in (are you ready for “OxyClinton”?). As a result the Fox effort at countering the Daily Show, the 1/2 Hour News Hour — a string of agonizing “burns” on Bush-haters and Hillary — remains the worst-rated show in the history of television, according to Metacritic. The irony gap eventually spelled doom for that group of Republicans, as Trump drove a truck through it in 2016. However, it’s possible they just weren’t as committed to the concept as current counterparts.

Take the Smithsonian story. The museum became the latest institution to attempt to combat racism by pledging itself to “antiracism,” a quack sub-theology that in a self-clowning trick straight out of Catch-22 seeks to raise awareness about ignorant race stereotypes by reviving and amplifying them.

The National Museum of African American History and Culture created a graphic on “Aspects and Assumptions of White Culture” that declared the following white values: “the scientific method,” “rational, linear thinking,” “the nuclear family,” “children should have their own rooms,” “hard work is the key to success,” “be polite,” “written tradition,” and “self-reliance.” White food is “steak and potatoes; bland is best,” and in white justice, “intent counts.”

The astute observer will notice this graphic could equally have been written by white supremacist Richard Spencer or History of White People parodist Martin Mull. It seems impossible that no one at one of the country’s leading educational institutions noticed this messaging is ludicrously racist, not just to white people but to everyone (what is any person of color supposed to think when he or she reads that self-reliance, politeness, and “linear thinking” are white values?).

The exhibit was inspired by white corporate consultants with Education degrees like Judith Katz and White Fragility author Robin DiAngelo, who themselves echo the work of more consultants with Ed degrees like Glenn Singleton of Courageous Conversations. Per the New York Times, Courageous Conversations even teaches that “written communication over other forms” and “mechanical time” (i.e. clock time) are tools by which “whiteness undercuts Black kids.”

The notion that such bugbears as as time, data, and the written word are racist has caught fire across the United States in the last few weeks, igniting calls for an end to virtually every form of quantitative evaluation in hiring and admissions, including many that were designed specifically to combat racism. Few tears will be shed for the SAT and ACT exams, even though they were once infamous for causing Harvard to be overpopulated with high-scoring “undesirables” like Jews and Catholics, forcing the school to add letters of reference and personal essays to help restore the WASP balance.

The outcry against the tests as “longstanding forces of institutional racism” by the National Association of Basketball Coaches is particularly hilarious, given that the real problem most of those coaches are combating is the minimal fake academic entry requirement imposed by the NCAA to help maintain a crooked billion-dollar business scheme based on free (and largely Black) labor. The tests have been tweaked repeatedly over the years to be more minority-friendly and are one of the few tools that gave brilliant but underprivileged kids a way to blow past the sea of rich suburbanites who feel oppressed by them … But, fine, let’s stipulate, as Neon Bodeaux put it, that “them tests are culturally biased.” What to make of the campaign to end blind auditions for musical positions, which the New York Philharmonic began holding in the early seventies in response to complaints of discrimination?

Before blind auditions, women made up less than 6 percent of orchestras; today they’re half of the New York Philharmonic. But because the change did not achieve similar results with Black and Hispanic musicians, the blind audition must now be “altered to take into fuller account artists’ backgrounds and experiences.” This completes a decades-long circle where the left/liberal project went from working feverishly to expunge racial stereotypes in an effort to level the playing field, to denouncing itself for ever having done so.

This would be less absurd if the effort were not being led in an extraordinary number of cases by extravagantly-paid white consultants like DiAngelo and Howard Ross, a “social justice advocate” whose company billed the federal government $5 million since 2006 to teach basically the same course on “whiteness” to agencies like NASA, the Treasury, the FDIC, and others.

It’s unsurprising that in the mouths of such people, the definitions of “whiteness” sound suspiciously like lazy suburban white stereotypes about Black America, only in reverse. They read like a peer-reviewed version of Bill de Blasio’s infamous joke about “CP Time.”

July 17, 2020

Not being racist isn’t enough … now you need to be actively anti-racist

Filed under: Books, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Critic, Ewa Dymek and Mateusz Dymek review Me and White Supremacy: How to Recognize your Privilege, Combat Racism and Change the World by Layla F. Saad (the North American release is subtitled “Combat Racism, Change the World and Become a Good Ancestor”):

Conceptually, systemic racism is a fuzzy concept. It morphs from being defined as an institution with racist policies to one with no racist policies and no racist individuals but is nevertheless still racist. In certain circles to come out and ask for clarity on what systemic racism is, is to reveal your own deep lack of intellectual sophistication: because nowadays everyone knows what it is – it’s this BIG thing. How big? What follows is quite a lot wide, circular arm movements illustrating that systemic racism is BIG and EVERYWHERE. And exactly where everywhere, is followed by eye rolling. Then, inevitably, the words “unconscious bias” will accompany the definition, to which a genuine response might be: “But you don’t consider yourself a racist, do you?” And silence will follow. It wasn’t a trick question but any answer in this particular milieu is tricky. To say out loud: “Yes, I am a racist” can obviously sound somewhat KKK. But to say the opposite could, according to the “creative visionary” Ms. Layla Saad, mean that “you have been conditioned into a white supremacist ideology, whether you have realized it or not.”

This, of course, is not an outlier view but in line with modern “Anti-racist” theories, such as Ibram X Kendi’s assertion that “the claim of ‘not racist’ neutrality is a mask for racism” or Robin DiAngelo’s insistence that a person declaring herself non-prejudice “only protects racism” (the author of White Fragility also penned the foreword to this book).

If these contradictions make perfect sense to you and wide, circular hand gestures are enough to explain the nuances of omnipresent racism, then you are primed for Ms. Saad’s acutely distressing self-help book Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor. Adapted from her 28-day Instagram challenge and drawn from childhood experiences of white supremacy in Wales and Swindon (before finishing up her schooling at a British private school in Qatar), the book is a heady mix of Mein Kampf meets The Secret. This bestseller takes the shape of an arduous course where each day you solemnly address the nuances of your deep hidden and latent racism towards the “BIPOCs” (Black, Indigenous, Persons of Colour). Daily written responses to journaling prompts are demanded of you (one would imagine in a jotter with a clenched black fist on its cover).

The core tenet of the Anti-Racist movement, as well as Ms. Saad’s curriculum, is to see the Western world through a racialist perspective, i.e. race and racism is always there to be found if you just put the hard work in. Ms. Saad explains: “I can count on one hand the number of times I experienced overt racism” but her teachings are not about that tangible, obvious type of racism, it’s about another type. The big and everywhere type. Through the Me and White Supremacy experience you will have to (if you’re white or “white-passing”) scrutinise every interaction with a person of a different skin colour for evidence of fetishisation, tokenism, colourism and “optical allyship” (helping a BIPOC just for show). Even as a bi-racial person, you will learn how each and every encounter with a BIPOC is probably an oppression and/or aggression that upholds your “internalised white privilege”. If the BIPOC in question happens to be your own child, you may find you are tokenising them too.

July 16, 2020

Curator forced to resign over “toxic white supremacist beliefs”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art parted company with a long-time curator for his racist views and white supremacist actions in continuing to pursue works to add to the collection from white male artists:

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1 September, 2008.
Photo by WolfmanSF via Wikimedia Commons.

Until last week, Gary Garrels was senior curator of painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). He resigned his position after museum employees circulated a petition that accused him of racism and demanded his immediate ouster.

“Gary’s removal from SFMOMA is non-negotiable,” read the petition. “Considering his lengthy tenure at this institution, we ask just how long have his toxic white supremacist beliefs regarding race and equity directed his position curating the content of the museum?”

This accusation — that Garrels’ choices as an art curator are guided by white supremacist beliefs — is a very serious one. Unsurprisingly, it does not stand up to even minimal scrutiny.

The petitioners cite few examples of anything even approaching bad behavior from Garrels. Their sole complaint is that he allegedly concluded a presentation on how to diversify the museum’s holdings by saying, “don’t worry, we will definitely still continue to collect white artists.”

Garrels has apparently articulated this sentiment on more than one occasion. According to artnet.com, he said that it would be impossible to completely shun white artists, because this would constitute “reverse discrimination.” That’s the sum total of his alleged crimes. He made a perfectly benign, wholly inoffensive, obviously true statement that at least some of the museum’s featured artists would continue to be white. The petition lists no other specific grievances.

H/T to Halls of Macademia for the link.

July 13, 2020

Sarah Hoyt on noblesse oblige

Filed under: Education, Government, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest edition of the Libertarian Enterprise, Sarah Hoyt explains how noblesse oblige can and is used as a tool to benefit the powerful:

Of all the traps a culture can fall into, the fact that Americans tend to fall into Noblesse Oblige traps says very good things about us. It also doesn’t make the trap any less dangerous.

Noblesse Oblige, aka “nobility obligates” was a way that the excesses of a hierarchical society was kept in check. While the peasants were obligated to obey the nobleman, the nobleman was obligated to look after them/not put extreme demands on them/behave in certain paternalistic ways. (One of these days I need to do a post on paternalistic versus patriarchal. remind me.)

It is what is notably lacking from ideologically driven totalitarianisms and hierarchies, probably because their basis being atheistic they don’t seem the humans they have power over as being worth anything or commanding any duty from them. This is why in places like Cuba, Venezuela or China, the officials of the “democratic” government give themselves airs as long-suffering public servants while treating the people under their power worse than any of us would treat a stray animal (let alone a pet.)

In the US — where the citizen is king! — we have evolved a form of noblesse oblige best described as “Them who can, do what they can for those who can’t.”

[…]

But the noblesse oblige that affects the common individual in America is the foundation of worse traps.

Most of the idiotic compliance with ridiculous Winnie the Flu rules and restrictions hooked directly into Noblesse Oblige. For instance, the brilliant idea that you should wear masks to show you care even though we pretty much know they are completely ineffective and quite deleterious for a vast swath of people.

The idea that our kids should be forced to perform “volunteer” labor to graduate school, to “teach them to care for others.” The idea that you can always do a little more/sacrifice a little more for “those worse off” (Who often aren’t.)

When Noblesse Oblige turns into toxic altruism, it can take society apart.

Much of the “Green” mania is part of the noblesse oblige trap. They’re trying to convince us that if we just do these little things — most of them counterproductive, like, say recycling, which uses more resources and causes more issues than just using stuff — we’ll make it better for everyone.

In a bigger sense, they’re trying to make it so that we commit polite suicide so that “others live better.”

It can result in truly horrible racism, too. A great part of the left’s being convinced, say, that meritocracy is white supremacy comes from the fact that, being white, (and racist) they assume that they’re more competent than any other race, and therefore following “merit” causes white people to rise to the top.

QotD: Anti-semitism

Filed under: Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… if anti-semitism was “only about Jews” it would still matter. Jews matter not because they are Jews, but because they are human. No different qualification is required. That anyone thinks a better qualification than being a human is required to enjoy particular human rights is precisely what is wrong with our society today. Every time someone speaks of “Gay Rights” or “Women’s Rights” or “Black Rights” or “Muslim Rights” or uses the phrase “hate crimes” I am immediately on my guard. Such people are more than likely to be a threat to human rights in general.

Damn it, how often does this need to be said before tribalists stop blathering? The whole point of the post-Enlightenment West is that every individual matters, regardless of who they are. Not just anti-semitism but tribalism in general is the virus that, as Rabbi Sacks says, keeps mutating. The only valid reason to regard an individual as better or worse is, as Dr King famously said (but as the Left seems to have forgotten) “the content of his character.” The only valid reason to treat an individual differently before the law is his or her conduct.

Tom Paine, “What Is It About The Jews?”, The Last Ditch, 2018-04-12.

July 8, 2020

H.G. Wells, fortunately for his reputation, is mostly remembered for his science fiction writings

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Politics, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I was well into my twenties before I found out that H.G. Wells the science fiction writer was only a small slice of his career. I picked up a one-volume edition of his Outline of History, but it didn’t seem to have the same interest for me that The War of the Worlds or The Time Machine had done (and honestly, it was Jeff Wayne’s musical interpretation of War of the Worlds that pushed me to read any of his writing). His analysis of the events of his day fell well short of his reputation, as George Orwell pointed out:

In March or April, say the wiseacres, there is to be a stupendous knockout blow at Britain … What Hitler has to do it with, I cannot imagine. His ebbing and dispersed military resources are now probably not so very much greater than the Italians’ before they were put to the test in Greece and Africa.

    The German air power has been largely spent. It is behind the times and its first-rate men are mostly dead or disheartened or worn out.

    In 1914 the Hohenzollern army was the best in the world. Behind that screaming little defective in Berlin there is nothing of the sort … Yet our military “experts” discuss the waiting phantom. In their imaginations it is perfect in its equipment and invincible in its discipline. Sometimes it is to strike a decisive “blow” through Spain and North Africa and on, or march through the Balkans, march from the Danube to Ankara, to Persia, to India, or “crush Russia”, or “pour” over the Brenner into Italy. The weeks pass and the phantom does none of these things — for one excellent reason. It does not exist to that extent. Most of such inadequate guns and munitions as it possessed must have been taken away form it and fooled away in Hitler’s silly feints to invade Britain. And its raw jerry-built discipline is wilting under the creeping realisation that the Blitzkrieg is spent, and the war is coming home to roost.

These quotations are not taken from The Cavalry Quarterly but from a series of newspaper articles by Mr. H. G. Wells, written at the beginning of this year and now reprinted in a book entitled Guide to the New World. Since they were written, the German Army has overrun the Balkans and reconquered Cyrenaica, it can march through Turkey or Spain at such time as may suit it, and it has undertaken the invasion of Russia. How that campaign will turn out I do not know, but it is worth noticing that the German general staff, whose opinion is probably worth something, would not have begun it if they had not felt fairly certain of finishing it within three months. So much for the idea that the German Army is a bogey, its equipment inadequate, its morale breaking down, etc. etc.

What has Wells to set against the “screaming little defective in Berlin”? The usual rigmarole about a World State, plus the Sankey Declaration, which is an attempted definition of fundamental human rights, of anti-totalitarian tendency. Except that he is now especially concerned with federal world control of air power, it is the same gospel as he has been preaching almost without interruption for the past forty years, always with an air of angry surprise at the human beings who can fail to grasp anything so obvious.

[…]

Mr. Wells, like Dickens, belongs to the non-military middle class. The thunder of guns, the jingle of spurs, the catch in the throat when the old flag goes by, leave him manifestly cold. He has an invincible hatred of the fighting, hunting, swashbuckling side of life, symbolised in all his early books by a violent propaganda against horses. The principal villain of his Outline of History is the military adventurer, Napoleon. If one looks through nearly any book that he has written in the last forty years one finds the same idea constantly recurring: the supposed antithesis between the man of science who is working towards a planned World State and the reactionary who is trying to restore a disorderly past. In novels, Utopias, essays, films, pamphlets, the antithesis crops up, always more or less the same. On the one side science, order, progress, internationalism, aeroplanes, steel, concrete, hygiene: on the other side war, nationalism, religion, monarchy, peasants, Greek professors, poets, horses. History as he sees it is a series of victories won by the scientific man over the romantic man.

In addition to being a surprisingly consistent one-note proponent of the same solution to every problem, he was, as Michael Coren relates, a nasty piece of work in his personal life:

There’s an anecdote concerning H.G. Wells that rather exemplifies his character. A London theatre in the 1920s. Wells was approached by a nervous, eager young fan. “Mr. Wells, you probably don’t remember me”, he said, holding out his hand. “Yes, I bloody do!” replied Wells, and rudely turned his back. Personality aside, Wells also embraced anti-Semitism, racism, and social engineering, and in this atmosphere of outrage and iconoclasm it’s surprising that he hasn’t been more targeted for symbolic removal. Then again, perhaps not. Because while the undoubtedly gifted author said and believed some dreadful things he was also a man of the left. And when it comes to cancel culture, socialism is the ultimate prophylactic.

George Bernard Shaw said of his nastiness and his ugly views, “Multiply the total by ten; square the result. Raise it again to the millionth power and square it again; and you will still fall short of the truth about Wells — yet the worse he behaved the more he was indulged; and the more he was indulged the worse he behaved.”

In fact, for much of the 20th-century eugenics was a creature of the left as much if not more than the right. Shaw himself, Sydney and Beatrice Webb and many other left-wing intellectuals were convinced that for the lives of the majority to improve there had to be a harsh control of the minority.

Wells argued that the existing social and economic structure would collapse and a new order would emerge, led by “people throughout the world whose minds were adapted to the demands of the big-scale conditions of the new time … a naturally and informally organized educated class, an unprecedented sort of people.” The “base,” the class at the bottom of the scale, “people who had given evidence of a strong anti-social disposition,” would be in trouble. “This thing, this euthanasia of the weak and the sensual, is possible. I have little or no doubt that in the future it will be planned and achieved.” He wrote of, “boys and girls and youth and maidens, full of zest and new life, full of an abundant joyful receptivity … helpers behind us in the struggle.” Then chillingly, “And for the rest, these swarms of black and brown and dingy white and yellow people who do not come into the needs of efficiency … I take it they will have to go.”

July 5, 2020

Andrew Sullivan – “There is no doubt at this point that communist China is a genocidal state”

Filed under: China, Government, Liberty, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In his latest column, Andrew Sullivan discusses China’s latest outrages against groups within China:

Protest against the Chinese government in Hong Kong, 25 November 2019.
Photo by Studio Incendo via Wikimedia Commons

Genocide is not measured simply by the number of human beings in a demographic group who have been killed. Such numbers vary. The pogroms in Europe of the 14th century killed far, far fewer Jews than died in the 20th-century Holocaust, but it would be crazy not to see a very similar eliminationist impulse. It’s the genocidal intent that defines a genocide. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum defines it as “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.” Their definition includes the following five categories:

  1. Killing members of the group.
  2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group.
  3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.
  4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.
  5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

There is no doubt at this point that communist China is a genocidal state. The regime is determined to coerce, kill, reeducate, and segregate its Uighur Muslim population, and to pursue eugenicist policies to winnow their ability to sustain themselves. The Associated Press just published an exhaustive and chilling account of the extent of the campaign, which was reportedly supported and seconded by the president of the United States when speaking with President-for-life Xi.

We already know about the reeducation camps. We found out this week the grisly detail that China may even have been exporting human-hair products taken from Uighur political prisoners in those camps. What the AP helps us better understand is how the regime is forcibly sterilizing Uighur women inside and outside the camps, attempting to control the Uighur population by assaulting basic reproductive freedom. Uighur families with multiple children are now in danger of being sent to camps for the crime of bringing Uighur kids into the world: “Time in a camp — what the government calls ‘education and training’ — for parents with too many children is written policy in at least three counties, notices found by [scholar Adrian] Zenz confirmed. In 2017, the Xinjiang government also tripled the already hefty fines for violating family planning laws for even the poorest residents — to at least three times the annual disposable income of the county.”

And the campaign of terror is working: “Birth rates in the mostly Uighur regions of Hotan and Kashgar plunged by more than 60% from 2015 to 2018, the latest year available in government statistics. Across the Xinjiang region, birth rates continue to plummet, falling nearly 24% last year alone — compared to just 4.2% nationwide, statistics show.” In the Uighur city of Hotan, over a third of all married women of childbearing age were sterilized in 2019 alone. And this is taking place in the context of a new campaign to increase the fertility and offspring of the majority Han Chinese. This is pure racial social engineering.

This genocidal dictatorship also took this past week to stomp all over what’s left of freedom in Hong Kong. Just before the anniversary of the end of British rule in Hong Kong, Beijing has introduced a new security law that all but eviscerates any freedom for dissent in the former British colony. It renders a variety of offenses that involve pro-democracy activism and criticism of the regime punishable by up to a lifetime in jail. The law is deliberately vague, was passed with no input from Hong Kong’s own government before its details were revealed, and criminalizes offenses such as “secession, subversion against the central Chinese government, terrorism, and colluding with foreign forces.”

The effect has been immediate: Key members of a leading dissident group, Demosisto, resigned, and the party has been disbanded. Throughout Hong Kong, businesses that had posted messages of support for the pro-democracy forces are swiftly removing them. People are deleting their social-media accounts for fear of imprisonment. A BBC reporter notes the immediate impact: “One contact of mine, a lawyer and human-rights activist, sent me a message shortly after the law was passed. ‘Please delete everything on this chat,’ he wrote.”

With Christianity on its last legs, westerners seem to be looking for secular replacement beliefs

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Media, Politics, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Reason, John McWhorter discusses the pseudo-religious trappings of modern day Social Justice devotions:

Over the past several years, a social justice philosophy has arisen that is less a political program than a religion in all but name. Where Christianity calls for people to display their moral worth through faith in Jesus, modern Third-Wave Antiracism (henceforth TWA) calls for people to display their moral worth through opposition to racism. In the wake of the murder of George Floyd, this vision has increasingly been expressed through procedures, routines, and phraseology directly patterned on Abrahamic religion.

America certainly has work to do on race. For one, while racism does not explain why cops kill more black than white people — poverty makes all people more likely to be killed by the cops, hundreds of poor whites are killed annually, but more black people are poor — they harass and abuse black people more than white people, and the real-life impact of this is in its way just as pernicious as the disparity in killings would be. If the tension between black people and the cops were resolved, America’s race problem would quickly begin dissolving faster than it ever has. But making this happen will require work, as will ending the war on drugs, improving educational opportunities for all disadvantaged black children, and other efforts such as steering more black teenagers to vocational programs training them for solid careers without four years of college.

These are real things, upon which we must behold scenes like in Bethesda, where protesters kneeled on the pavement in droves, chanting allegiance with upraised hands to a series of anti-white privilege tenets incanted by what a naïve anthropologist would recognize as a flock’s pastor. On a similar occasion, white protesters bowed down in front of black people standing in attendance. In Cary, North Carolina, whites washed black protesters’ feet as a symbol of subservience and sympathy. Elsewhere, when a group of white activists painted whip scars upon themselves in sympathy with black America’s past, many black protesters found it a bit much.

Such rituals of subservience and self-mortification parallel devout Christianity in an especially graphic way, but other episodes tell the same story. Many conventional religious institutions are now rejecting actual Christianity where it conflicts with TWA teachings. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a chaplain was forced to resign after writing a note exploring the contradiction between roasting the police as racist and the Christian call for love of all souls. Unitarianism has been all but taken over in many places by modern antiracist theology, forcing the resignation of various ministers and other figures.

The new faith also manifests itself in objections to what its adherents process as dissent. A friend wrote on Facebook that they agreed with Black Lives Matter, only to have another person — a white one, for the record — post this reply: “Wait a minute! You ‘agree’ with them? That implies you get to disagree with them! That’s like saying you ‘agree’ with the law of gravity! You as a white person don’t get to ‘agree’ OR ‘disagree’ when black people assert something! Saying you ‘agree’ with them is every bit as arrogant as disputing them! This isn’t an intellectual exercise! This is their lives on the line!”

This objection seems studiously hostile until we compare it to how a devout Christian might feel about someone opining that he “agrees” with Jesus’ teachings, as if the custom were to think one’s way through the liturgy in logical fashion and decide what parts of it makes sense, rather than to suspend logic and have faith.

The religious analogies pile higher by the week.

June 29, 2020

Today on NeoNaziHuntingExpeditions, we track down Neo Nazi Bronies

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Quillette, Daniel Friedman examines the claims made in a recent Atlantic investigation into Nazis in the My Little Pony community (that is, adult fans of the show, not little girls … I think):

Image found by searching for “Neo Nazi Bronies”, listed URL – http://www.democraticunderground.com/1014960111

The evidence of this Nazi problem in the My Little Pony fandom is that, on a My Little Pony imageboard called Derpibooru, over 900 images were tagged as “racist,” and images mocking Black Lives Matter were upvoted by users while images supporting the movement were downvoted, even as the site’s administrators made a statement of support for the protests. After much controversy, the imageboard banned uploading images “created for no reason other than to incite controversy” and removed the 926 images tagged “racism” or “racist.” This move was extremely controversial within the Derpibooru community, many members of which oppose any moderation.

Atlantic reporter Kaitlyn Tiffany suggests that the strong free-speech norms of the Derpibooru boards stem from its origins on 4Chan, which Tiffany describes as “the largest den of chaos and toxic beliefs available on the Internet.” She describes the Brony community as being divided between those who “genuinely enjoy My Little Pony and the wholesome escapism it provides” and trolls who think it is “edgy and provocative to be an adult obsessed with cartoon ponies.” This frames the Derpibooru imageboard as a place where innocent cartoon fans are unknowingly subjected to subversive, racist memes and images that may send people down a rabbit hole of far-right content.

However, claims that a significant portion of the Brony community are Nazis, or that a significant amount of the content on Brony imageboards is right-wing propaganda or racist memes has to be put in the proper context. First of all, the 926 images tagged “racist” exist on a board that hosts over two million images. If you order all the site’s various tags by how many images fall within their categories, there are 12 full pages of other, more popular tags you have to scroll through to find the “racism” tag. One thousand two hundred and seventy-five images are tagged “politics” and include images both supporting and opposing Black Lives Matter. Discussion of these issues is a tiny fraction of one percent of the content on the My Little Pony imageboard.

By contrast, 315,867 images on the Derpibooru forum are tagged as sexually explicit, a further 127,414 images are tagged as sexually suggestive and 105,521 images are tagged as containing “questionable” sexual content. The truth is that Derpibooru’s lax moderation norms and anti-censorship culture don’t exist to protect objectionable political content; this imageboard is unmoderated because it is an enormous repository of fan-made My Little Pony pornography.

The Atlantic article fails to place the 926 racist images in the context of the larger scope of the two million images hosted by the Derpibooru board, because less than one-quarter of one percent of the site’s content is of a political nature. And the Atlantic article avoids mentioning the half-million pornographic images the site hosts, because doing so reveals that the community’s widespread opposition to content moderation on their imageboard is about protecting sexually explicit content rather than creating a space for hateful politics to flourish, and it further reveals that the Bronies are 500 times more interested in having sex with My Little Pony characters than they are in spreading racist pony memes.

The article creates an impression that the alt-Right is using seemingly-innocent cartoon fandoms as a Trojan horse to conceal and spread a sinister ideology, but the truth is that the only thing these guys are interested in hiding inside a horse is their dicks.

June 26, 2020

The rise of the Karenfinder General

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Brendan O’Neill on the recent phenomena of the Karens and the anti-Karens:

The most important thing here is the question of where the Karenfinder Generals derive their power from. It comes from the insatiable appetite among identitarian reactionaries for mis-speakers or wrongthinkers they can ritualistically denounce and destroy. It is this warped social-media appetite for spectacles of shaming, for being part of a virtual mob that takes to task an allegedly evil person, that bolsters and empowers people like Karlos Dillard. It is reported that he has a strange obsession with Karens and he is even selling anti-Karen t-shirts through his Instagram page. This speaks to the extent to which Karen-shaming has become a kind of industry. There are memes, there is branded clothing, and there are of course the videos of exposed and shattered Karens which are watched and shared millions of times. Dillard was able to reduce Leah to a weeping wreck desperately trying to remain anonymous because of this broader, entrenched and increasingly misogynistic culture of seeking out white women to revile and tear down.

One of the great ironies of the witch-hunting of Karens is that the people doing the filming and public shaming are far more Karen-like than the women they humiliate. The Karen prejudice is built on a view of certain middle-class, often middle-aged, white women as uncouth and arrogant and given to complaining. They always want to “speak with the manager”. But no one wants to “speak with the manager” as gleefully as the Karenfinder Generals. Their entire mission is to report on “problematic” people to the managers of acceptable thought, to the bosses of correct-think: the new PC elites. Their thirst for tearing people down for doing or saying something wrong utterly overshadows the instinct to complain that any middle-class white woman might have.

Consider the recent Central Park incident in which a woman called Amy Cooper called the cops on a black man called Christian Cooper (no relation) and claimed that he was harassing her when in truth he was reprimanding her for letting her dog off its leash in a part of the park where you’re not meant to do that. Amy behaved badly in this incident. But as Robert A George argued in the New York Daily News: “[Christian] is the ‘Karen’ in this encounter, deciding to enforce park rules unilaterally and to punish ‘intransigence’ ruthlessly.” Amy Cooper’s life has been shattered by this Karen-shaming incident: she lost her job and her dog.

Or consider the case of Lisa Alexander, the CEO of a San Francisco-based cosmetics company who was recently filmed by a Filipino man after she asked him why he was writing “Black Lives Matter” on the wall outside a private residential property. Alexander may have been wrong to presume that this Filipino man couldn’t possibly live in one of these plush private residences, but she is polite, patient and not remotely racist during their encounter. At one point the man even suggests that she call the police and she looks shocked and says: “I don’t want to call the police.” And yet she was put online, shamed across the world, lost business as a result, and then issued a self-denouncing confession in which she accepts, essentially, that she is a witch. “I did not realise at the time that my actions were racist”, she said. “I am taking a hard look at the meaning behind white privilege and am committed to growing from this experience.”

It all gets more Salem-like by the day. Just as accused witches of old could never deny the accusations against them – denial often carried a greater penalty than confession – so Karens today must immediately confess to the sin of racism if they want any hope of at least partially saving their reputations and their futures. As in earlier outbreaks of witch-hunting, Karen-hunting puts women into a bind. If they deny the charge of racism, that is held up as proof of just how racist they are. If they confess to the charge of racism, that is of course also proof of their foul, evil minds, of their possession by the demon of race-hatred. Lisa Alexander’s confession of wickedness and promise to re-educate herself on the evils of white privilege sums up how religious the identitarian outlook has become. She is in essence on her knees begging for salvation, pleading for redemption, offering to do the intellectual penance of learning the horrible truth about her “white privilege” – that is, her sinful state, her fallen nature.

June 25, 2020

QotD: Cultural appropriation

Filed under: History, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In the ever-widening gyre of what cannot be appropriated without causing offense, now even American heroes are off limits. Apparently, Caucasians are no longer allowed to quote Martin Luther King. While I almost sympathize with the view that too many people of all colors tend to only quote King’s more saccharine words, it is surreal that some African-Americans would be outraged that others quote such an admirable American: “MLK belongs to us. Do not dare to quote my MLK. My Martin Luther King Jr., was not here for white people. Keep his name out your thin-lipped mouth. Y’all banned forever.” Belongs? Like a possession? Is the bitter irony of talking about King as a possession — mere chattel, the private property of a particular group — lost on some members of the current generation of African Americans? I had thought that, at least since the passage of the 13th Amendment, people could not be owned.

Joseph Mussomeli, “Victim Privilege, Cultural Appropriation, & the New Enslavement”, The Imaginative Conservative, 2018-02-09.

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